Whenever a new fragment by Wilde appears, it inevitably raises hope that the often vulgarized but still fascinating relationship between the life and the work will somehow be clarified. Did the one really get all the genius, the other merely the talent, as he told Gide? Were the two always so disparate, so irreconcilable, as he insisted? Did work always seems, as he once said it seemed, ‘not a reality but a way of getting rid of reality’? If so, was this why ‘the real life is the life we do not lead’, the life of the literary imagination? Or was it that the ‘real life’ and ordinary life alternately promised Wilde those intense experiences his imagination craved, then took it in turns to double-cross him?